While this has been a personal, sneaky suspicion of mine for quite sometime, it’s important that we really understand what this means:

It is perfectly fine to indulge with some red meat & oils on a regular basis.

It is NOT okay to ruthlessly and without pause, jam as much of the stuff down your gullet as possible.

While I have been a crusader for the positive benefits of red meat for as long as I can remember, it’s still important to remember there can be adverse consequences of overeating almost everything, especially fatty foods. So, the lesson is as it has always been:

Maintain a balanced diet INCLUDING but certainly not limited to, delicious, delicious animals.

Also, trans-fats will still burn your face off and steal your children….

If you haven’t had the chance to check out the new “Cosmos” with Astrophysicist Neil DeGrass Tyson, you are doing yourself a disservice.

You might be familiar with the title, as world-renowned physicist Carl Sagan brought us the prequel, of sorts, to this series and it, at the time, opened the eyes of un-counted numbers of future scientists, artists, and curious agents all over the globe.

This time, we have the technology to delve deeper into the universe itself, and combining that with modern graphic interfaces, we get a view of the “cosmos” unlike that which we’ve ever seen before. The greatest contribution I can imagine from this series, much like its predecessor, is that it will open doors to new worlds for otherwise disinterested kids along the way. At least that’s my hope.

The point of all this is simple: when we take a step back and realize exactly what scale the universe operates on, in regard to both time AND space, it becomes obvious that we are but insignificant specs in an unimaginably vast expanse – an expanse no human can ever expect to fully experience. Further, it brings home something very, very important: Don’t take life too seriously; you’ll never get out alive.

Write that down!!

I’m sure you’ve heard that one before, but it holds true, 100%. The next time you get caught up in your daily to-dos, you get stressed out, and you feeling like giving in, possibly fibbing your diet or exercise, realize there are much greater problems all over the world and, to boot, the UNIVERSE….I find this perspective keeps me level more times than not.

I know, I know: “But Shelby, if I don’t matter on a grand scale, why should I try to better myself in the first place?”.

Because, you shouldn’t take your life too seriously, but you SHOULD realize it’s your life, and you only get one. You might only get the opportunity to make an impact on a small portion of the population in this great expanse, but that impact still counts – it’s the only thing we can ever hope to make us more than mortal.

If you’ve listened to a radio a, watched a TV commercial, or spent any time whatsoever on the internet in the past year or two, I’m pretty sure you are 127% convinced at this point that you do, in fact, suffer from this affliction.

You know the symptoms:

General lethargy

“Off” sleep schedule

Higher incidence of illness

Lowered “libido”

Loss of limbs (this one might not be 100% accurate)

And I’m sure that GNC, Dr. Oz, and myriad other consumer outlets would love for you to believe as much, but if you take one more look at that list, the symptoms resemble another terrifying epidemic: Poor diet and little or no exercise.

Don’t, in any way, get me wrong here: some folks certainly do have Low-T, but unfortunately it has become just the next over-diagnosed issue we have (or don’t have) as a society. My recommendation is to get your diet and workout schedule right, then sleep a bit, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your Testosterone levels “rise”, along with that “libido”🙂

Today, I’m going to try and make things as simple as possible: I want to ensure you are reaching your full potential with both your diet and exercise routines. To do so, I’ll simply share three small bits of advice which, universally, produce greater results, guaranteed:

SHOW UP

Sometimes, it really is as simple as showing up, sucking it up, and living it up. You are not always going to have every bit of motivation necessary to knock a workout out of the park, but I can promise you that twenty minutes of subpar work is still infinitely better than ZERO minutes of ZERO work. Even if you can think of 746 other things you’d rather be doing, simply get out there, and the results will follow.

PREPARE

I still fall into this trap every now and then. I’ll get home from a long day of work and, knowing I still need to prepare for the following day (pack lunch, get all my workout equipment and nutrition squared away, and on and on…), I simply put it off until the morning. I figure I’ll get up five minutes earlier and no harm, no foul, right? WRONG. When you’ve just awakened in the morning, your motor skills and mental capacity are basically those of a toddler, with no grasp on necessity with reference to desire. Point being: prepare and succeed; easy as that. Darrell Royal said something about that one time – I’ll let you do the research though.

DO NOT OVER-IDENTIFY WITH YOUR RESULTS

Exercise and dieting are what you do, not who you are. The easiest way to fall off the “wagon” is to have a crappy workout, give in to a craving, or God forbid, skip a workout, and then proceed to guilt yourself down the rabbit-hole to the point that you completely give up because you aren’t”perfect”. Live a little. Enjoy life. Take your small victories. Also, endure your small failures. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is your perfect body. Chill out. Relax. Get sexy.